Mental illness isn't the cause of mass shootings, let's just make that clear [View all]
People without mental illness commit mass shootings.
People without mental illness engage in domestic violence against their family members and also murder their family members.
Some mass killings or shootings are committed by people who have mental illnesses.
But mental illness is so common and so broad, it's like saying that people with skin commit murders --it's meaningless. Mental illness is as common as depression or other problems and challenges.
The discussion in the media and even here of late, suggests that if we can just identify those with mental illnesses, we'll simply know who is a danger to us. But we won't.
Identifying and treating those who deal with mental illness is a wonderful and humane idea, unless the aim is simply some fishing expedition aimed at institutionalizing or imprisoning such people in order to avoid any restrictions on guns --the "mentally ill" will be the scapegoats in such a scenario).
If one identifies *all* those with mental illnesses, you'll simply get a huge list of people, but that list won't tell you anything about who is safer with a gun and who isn't.
We need to make sure, especially in this community (where it should be known better) that we are not scapegoating, nor allowing the broad category of "mentally ill" to be blamed for murderous things and tendencies and especially not allow them to be used by special interest groups to divert restrictions on guns.
= new reply since forum marked as read